Echoes in a Hollow Space

The santana winds have kicked up hard today—even blew the screen out of the porch window. Not a good bit of weather to do outside tiling in. First because the winds dry out the mastic (the sticky stuff) too quickly. You can't get the tiles on fast enough if the wind blows hard enough. Added to that, bits of windblown matter adhere to the sticky stuff. No mosaicing done today.

Also this week, the weather at night turned decidedly fallish—at least here near the coast. After sundown, the air has gotten chilly and a bit damp. I had my first hot chocolate of the season last evening. Also not good weather for drying mastic. It's the kind of weather that keeps it wetter and adds to the possibility of the mosaic pieces falling off. That's probably not going to change, even if the santanas calm down. The rainy season here in the South of California is generally between November and about March. It sometimes lasts into April but rarely beyond that. (And we do need the rain, so I'll be glad of it if we get a really drenching winter.) Therefore, I have called off the Great Cinder Block Wall Mosaic Project until the weather gets hot again in late spring. Am sad, but resigned.

I knew it was something of a gamble starting this project so late in the year, but here in SoCal the months of September and October are often the hottest of the year. That was not the case this year, so my gamble—and the delays in September, plus having several Saturdays eaten up with other events—didn't pay off.

This mosaic has taught me many lessons about the creative process. I think if you're doing it right and taking chances like you should, every creative process does teach you lessons, even if it's just a reiteration of concepts with which you were already familiar. And so the final lesson of the Great Mosaic Project in one I can readily apply to writing or any other creative endeavor: timing is everything.

No, I have not completed my mosaic-on-the-cinder-block-wall project yet, but I got everything sorted and the pattern laid out before my back gave out on me ( a lot of leaning over a table at a funny angle will do that to one). I'll have to wait until next Sunday to stick everything to the wall, and unfortunately, it will probably be the Sunday after that before I can grout. My Saturdays are booked up for the next two weeks and after work...it's getting dark these days. I think I'll wait until the grouting is done before posting any pictures.

So, my lessons so far are these:

1. Everything takes much longer than you think it's going to take.

Actually, this is a general lesson for all craft, art, home improvement—and why, yes, writing—project I have ever done. Still I persist in my optimism, only to be hoist on my own petard. My petard is getting really stretched out by this time.

2. Vision does not correspond to practice.

See #1 above.

3. You may think you've gotten all the supplies you need, but as soon as you start to work you will discover you're missing something.

See #1 and #2 above.

4. In a mosaic large pieces are good for accents, but you want most of them to be middling to small pieces.

I found this out after carefully sorting all the big pieces into a basket with the little pieces mostly buried. I laid out the big pieces and they looked wretched and chock-a-block. I had to start all over again. The new pattern looks quite good.

5. Sometimes a really ugly piece of ceramic makes for the best accent pieces of all.

And sometimes they remain really ugly pieces of ceramic, only in smaller bits.

I came across some very interesting sites this week which kicked up a lot of dust in my psyche. I thought I'd share:

http://postsecret.blogspot.com/

You may have heard of this one if you listened to NPR this week. This is a site where people anonymously send in their secrets to be posted.

It made me hanker after doing conceptual art again...

The Post Secret web site is all about communal art, about making an art installation without any physical space, and I just loved it. It's cool to think of random strangers sending in bits and pieces of themselves for a collaboration; because they needed to share and felt safe to do it here; because they just couldn't resist. I wanted to do something similar using virtual space instead of physical, but I haven't thought of anything yet that isn't derivative. Got a little notion of something this morning (based on a random event in my vicinity), but it's not fully formed yet.

I used to do visual art along with the writing, but I reached a point of diminishing energy and had to choose between the two. I knew that the time had come where I had to focus seriously on the writing if I was going to take it to the next level and for me, because of that limited time and energy, that meant laying aside other things. It really wasn't too difficult: writing gives me the fire in the belly, visuals and conceptual art are things I like, that are fun, but don't instill the same kind of passion. So I set aside my plans for art installations and thing-making (I was a sculpture and textile arts girl rather than a drawing/painting girl). For the most part, I haven't looked back. I pull out a project now and then when I just want to relax and work on something, but I'm not filled with longing for lost art projects.

As I said, this secrets project has me thinking about doing art installations that don't take up physical space (always a problem for someone living in a one-bedroom apartment). I used to make plans for installations, even started a couple—artworks where viewers could actually walk into and participate in—but I'm a non-affiliated artist. I didn't go to art school, don't know the right people, have no gallery or museum hook-ups. So the chances of getting anyone to let me have space to set up one of these is next to nil.
If I'd really had the passion for it, as I do with writing, that wouldn't have stopped me. Which tells me more than anything that it wasn't my passion, wasn't meant to be, wasn't where I needed to focus.

http://www.foundmagazine.com/

Related, in a way, but different. This magazine is also something of a communal art project. People send in notes they find on the streets, or pictures of the notes they've found if they don't want to give them up. These are alternately moving and hilarious, sometimes creepy as hell, sometimes cute—and utterly absorbing. At least for someone of my proclivities.

I wanted to go out immediately and start searching the streets...

One of the things I used to love to do was found object sculpture. I'd incorporate random things found on the streets, garage sales, thrift stores—wherever—and make them into interesting object collages. I L-O-V-E the work of randomness in art, love to take disparate things and make them into something new, or take something old and give it a new perspective. This is a very powerful pull for me and this site really kicks that excitement up. I'm a big fan of Betty Saar, who did a lot of this in her work—often intimate and delicate and female. A lot of artists have done this and I recently saw an exhibit at the Norton Simon of just this kind of thing—but can I remember any of the other artists??? A mind is a terrible thing to waste...

Lost but Found: Assemblage, Collage and Sculpture, 1920-2002 It just ended, so they don't have the exhibit info still up. There were big guys like Picasso and Duchamp as well as others less well known. Some really good stuff.

You know, I guess it's not really all that different from your crazy Uncle Ned who likes to make lawn decorations out of hub caps, et al. Just a different perspective on the same idea, really. But whether it's Uncle Ned or Betty Saar or Marcel Duchamp, there's a power to this stuff, something that declares, "Look here! Everything has its own beauty (even the ugly stuff). Everything is just a matter of how you look at things."

In honor of this, I pulled out a broken dish mosaic that's been in the back of the closet for ever so long. I really don't have the time for it right now, but I'm thinking maybe I need to at least fiddle with it a bit. Even if it's just to look at it and say, "Huh," and put it away again. Creativity feeds creativity. Everything we do to nourish our souls inevitably gets returned to us in our art. Especially when we're in the saggy middle sections of our novels and feeling frustrated and restless...

Our blackest stuff, our brightest stuff, our random occurrences, all go into the making of who we are and have to be accepted as part of the toll we pay for a rich life. Sometimes it makes one seem foolish, that enthusiasm of the true geek, but being a Fool isn't such a bad thing. I think if we were more willing to be foolish now and again, to live out our geekage unapologetically, we'd have fuller and more complete lives. It's that trying to be cool all the time crap that really impoverishes us.

But there's foolish and there's foolish:

http://www.livejournal.com/community/customers_suck/9865898.html?thread=10778282

I sure hope you can open the sound file on this. When you read it in transcript it sounds like a hoax, but when you hear the tape it seems all-too-horrifyingly-real. It has nothing to do with the other two sites—except maybe in an absurdist, randomist kind of way.